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In NASCAR, South may rise again

Ricky Stenhouse Jr.’s full-time ascent to the Sprint Cup series next season will help the South rise again, at least by one in terms of drivers from below the Mason-Dixon Line racing full-time in NASCAR’s top series.

With NASCAR growing from a regional curiosity into a national major league, with races spanning the continent—in the Chicago area and Indianapolis the next two weeks—and drivers soon being culled from the entire nation, Southern drivers make up a diminishing segment of the drive pool.

There are a number of reasons, from the degradation of Southern facilities to races being seeded outside the region. Stenhouse used a break with Tony Stewart’s sprint-car team to catch Jack Roush’s attention and acquire his key career break. It’s not so easy anymore for a driver from Mississippi.

“I have noticed that,” Stenhouse said. “I’ve had talks with people and they’re like, ‘Oh, it’s a Southern sport.’ And I say, well if you look at the drivers, they’re from California and really everywhere. I think it’s about having that right opportunity and I got that right opportunity living in Mississippi. It’s tough. These days, there are certain owners you can go drive for and really nobody comes in owning their own team like they used to. Everybody in the South owns their own dirt car team, but they don’t own a Nationwide team or a truck team, because they’ve gotten where it took so much money to run these organizations you just can’t have somebody own a truck and go race.”

But increasingly, Stenhouse said, hometown doesn’t matter.

“We have a lot of fans up in Boston with our Fenway partnership. I obviously have a lot of fans in Mississippi, but no one is like ‘You’re from the South, I like you’,” Stenhouse said. “The way NASCAR fans are, they like you or they don’t and it’s usually how you are, the way you drive and stuff like that.”

Just 10 drivers from the South raced this season in the iconic Southern 500 at Darlington Raceway, and only one—Dale Earnhardt Jr.—is from the sport’s hub of North Carolina. Ten drivers from California, alone, competed at Darlington, including race winner and five-time series champion Jimmie Johnson. And speaking of championships, no Southern driver has won NASCAR’s top-series title since Texas product Bobby Labonte in 2000.

The drivers from the south, particularly Georgia and the Carolinas, dominated the 75-car field of the first Southern 500 in 1950.

The last North Carolinian titlist was Dale Jarrett the previous season as the rise of Midwestern and California racers—notably four-time champion Jeff Gordon, three-timer Tony Stewart and Johnson—became prevalent.